As I noticed the recurring ads in my social media feed in April of 2022, I was struck immediately by the absence of women. Where are the women? I checked out the Hallow blog and found precious little input from women. I did find this rather telling piece by the founder’s wife:
I think it’s safe to say that watching the joy of a loved one doing something they love is deeply moving. The same is true for how I feel about Alex. At times, I have peered up from grading my fifth graders’ homework to look over at him.
This vision of women, thus far seems to be the predominating one on Hallow. Wives, mommies, help-mates.
Hallow is a Boys’ Club.
Because I think it important to research the app before actually using it, I have, to date, only scant familiarity with the Hallow app’s content. A cursory look, however, reveals that it is extremely male-dominated, which given the affiliations and orientations of those endorsing and funding the app, should not surprise. Lets look at the Catholic men hawking Hallow:
Brett Favre
Devout Catholic, Hallow spokesperson, gridiron Luminary, ‘Reverse Robin Hood’ Thief & Erotic Photography Maven, Brett Favre
One of the Catholics who appeared in Hallow ads is the publicly devout” Catholic Brett Favre, net worth: (estimated) $100 million who was caught about two weeks ago seeming to steal from indigent folks to buy his daughter’s school a state of the art volleyball stadium. Favre has not been charged:
Regardless of what happens to Favre in the formal settings that chronicle his football achievements, there is a number that is perhaps more striking than his streak of 321 consecutive starts: the $8 million meant for poor people that he is accused by the state of pushing to his personal interests, despite having earned more than $140 million in his N.F.L. playing career.
(The New York Times, September 26. 2022)
So far as I can tell there has been no official statement from Hallow regarding their association with Favre.
Not an ideal frontman for a Catholic prayer app, you say?
Not so fast. he also has a history of harassing women (He has been accused of sending unsolicited pictures of his sex organs to women, and was fined $50, 000 at the time of the accusation, for failing to cooperate with investigators.)
The Most Unctuous Manchild in a Miter, Robert Barron, Has Content on Hallow and one of his Special Body Builder Buddies is on the Hallow Advisory Board
Lens Louse grifter Bishop Barron with his special friend / the employee, Joseph Gloor, who is not a Hallow advisor, but who works very closely with Barron. Gloor has been accused of of sexual harassment in the Word of Fire shop.
Notoriously misogynistic Opus Dei adherent lens louse bishop Robert Barron is a spokesman for Hallow and one of the muscle-men (Barron appears to like hiring body-builders to man his Word of Fire outfit!) Stephen Grunow , a priest, (pictured below) is one of the “advisors” who helps Hallow stay “authentically aligned with the Church.” (Word of Fire has recently been been the subject of numerous articles making public a sexual harassment problem in their office of operations.)
Hallow advisor Fr. Stephen Grunow
It is interesting to note that there are three women on the Hallow Advisors’ Team. Two write books about being mommies and the third is a nun.
Here’s Bishop Barron’s special friend “Joey” Gloor, again! Pictured wearing a crucifix and “flipping” some entity “the bird.”
Much has been written about Robert Barron, so I’ll just skim the surface here. (I plan to do a deep dig on Barron for my upcoming analysis of “lens louse priests.”) Robert Barron appears to be / is an Opus Dei adherent who embodies the “new and updated easygoing” vibe Opus Dei has adopted in recent years in the interest of recruiting young people.
Barron has convinced Catholics he is some kind of intellectual. He’s not; he’s just pompous. Barron reaches, from time to time, for content on which to predicate the illusion of his secular erudition. His crush on Jordan Peterson may extend out of this effort. to be part of such a project. Barron’s recent Youtube commentary on Foucault reminded me of the way my high school and undergraduate students talked/ wrote about assigned content they had failed to read for homework, and seems designed to boost Barron’s bizarre one-two punch that combines performance of penchants for highbrow philosophical — topics he remembers from studying in Paris — and his “Golly, wasn’t it great when Johnny Carson was on every night and politics were never discussed on late-night television?”
For some reason, Pope Francis just made an ordinary of a bishop (Barron) who has perfected the Joel Osteen / Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker/ Reverend Ike /”prosperity Gospel” grift.
Barron is a misogynist. He’s racist. He peddles Bibles, “marked-up” editions of The Liturgy of the Hours, Word of Fire swag — T-shirts, water bottles, socks, expensive Bibles with his own integralist spin woven into the commentary— Talk about money lenders in the temple!
Barron is an unctuous confidence-man who has managed, due to reasons having little to do with religious perspectives, to garner support from prominent priests in almost every sector of American Catholicism, as well as from, again, the pope himself. Barron is likely an earner, and that may explain his popularity with some. In any case it seems as if he’s never met a misogynist or a billionaire he doesn’t want to flatter or stroke, and he loves white men as much as he detests “wokeness.”
Barron is affiliated with a godawful Opus Dei think tank at a sexual harassment and abuse hotspot Franciscan University in Stubenville, Ohio.
A colossal star-f*cker, Barron did Hallow ads, interviewing Mark Wahlberg as part of the Father Stu promotional tour, and at the present time, the muscleman fetishist and lens louse grifter has content on the app. Barron loves money. His Word on Fire operation squeezes a lot of cash out of the pensioners and EWTN watchers who buy his merch and donate to his “cause” and none of this cash, according to Word on Fire it goes to “widows and orphans. “It all goes back into the “New Evangelization” delivery system. Barron loves celebrity and knows proximity to celebrities helps to keep him front and center. He shilled. recently, for allegedly recovering misogynist batterer Shia LeBoeuf, another guy using the “I’m not holy but I play a Catholic priest on screen” path to private and public redemption.
Be careful listening to it as you fall asleep. You might wake up with your bank account empty.
MMS
September 25, 2022; Revised September 28, 2022
Brooklyn, NY
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